Italian Acerbis showed an interesting motorcycle jacket that promotes our safety at night. As you can see from the animated gif photo below, the jacket has several LED strips built in to the jacket (sides, rear and front).

Acerbis High-LED jacket

The LEDs have a low battery usage, and at night you can see the LED, but they are not strong. The animated gif was taken in full light, so you can not see how strong the lights are, but you get the message.

The jacket is called “High-LED” and is made out of Nylon Polyamide with Oxford 1680D reinforcements. It has a removable interior and EVA back protector

Airoh helmets showed a different technology for motorcycle helmets to keep our cool during hot weather. They have a new visor system that reflects heat.

In the photo below, the first one you see the visor when it is hit by hot sunlight:

Warm sunlight

And in the next photo you see it during normal weather, when even with direct sunlight but not hot, the visor is clear. Obviously the sunlight strength is filtered out of your eyes, but more important, there is less heat coming into your helmet.

We’ve already talked about the wonder material from D3O (click here to read it). It is light, extremely shock absorbant and it’s even high-tech. D3O have adapted their materials to the new protection requirement, EN1621-2.

D3O King Cobra

The Cobra series are available for protection level 1 or 2. As you can see it is quite thin (22.5 mm) and will withstand crashes in all kinds of weather and temperatures.

D3O Cobra Pro

The ultimate protection is called King Cobra, a level 2 protection for your back. The Cobra Pro featured here is level 2 as well.

For those of you who use protective clothing when riding your motorcycle, one of the latest advances in safety technologies comes from D3O Labs.

D3O is a material that you will find more and more in all sorts of clothing meant to protect the person dressed in them. It is not only for the motorcycle world, but in any activity that exposes people to sudden shocks (snow sports, horse riding, military, etc). D3O is also know as dilatant non-Newtonian fluid (like a liquid metal), a material that hardens when exposed to a shock.

D30 example

What this means, is that the D3O material, an orange putty-like material, is placed in areas that need to absorb a shock. The material itself is soft and deforms easily when moving around. You can barely feel the resistance, in sharp contrast with material like Kevlar.

But when exposed to an impact, for example if you are ejected from your motorcycle and hit the pavement, the D3O material instantly becomes hard as metal and in the process, absorbs the shock. Moments later, it returns to its original soft state.

D3O is slightly more expensive than materials like Kevlar, but because the flexibility and lightweight of D3O, it’s much more usable then other types of protection. You will find D3O nowadays in gloves, jackets, pants and even back packs. Myself, I have a D3O protection for my iPhone, and after having dropped it several times, I’m happy to report that the protection works.

If you’re interested in more information about the making, and the usage of D30, here’s a short video that explains it all.